BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE #2

The Incredible Shrinking Author

Please keep these words in your sight at all times. If you look away, who knows what might happen?

****

What do you see in The Marquis de Sade? Beats me!

What’s the difference between 16.5 feet and a former New York Yankee all-star 3rd baseman?

NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL. BOTH ARE A ROD.

New item on the U.S. Congress Dining Rooms: SQUID PRO QUO, served with side dish of dirt on Biden.

**

ON THE MUSICAL PAL JOEY

I advanced the theory at the time that immorality on the stage is perfectly acceptable as long as isn’t accompanied by popular music.

Wolcott Gibbs

  
 IRISES

 
 What we did, where we were,
 Who we were then,
  
 I no longer remember,
 & every so often names escape me,
  
 But your face remains firm
 Where once my heart beat wildly,
  
 Remembering your wide skirt,
 Your smile
  
 That made days open & close,
 So today I bring  these words
  
 Opening & closing, closing &
 Opening. I bring them to you
  
 Because the flower lady
 On our corner
  
 Had sold out the irises
 Which you love so much. 

*****

Had sold out the irisesOn our corner

NEWSWEEK & GLOBAL WARNING IN 1952

Comman des Courtland J.W. (Jim) Simpson of the Royal Navy “who visited Greenland with a Danish expedition in 1950, has a hunch that ‘in a thousand years, probably tens of thousand years’ the vanishing ice will raise the world’s sea level by 16 feet,thereby flooding most seaports.

Newsweek July 14, 1952

SALVATION

…when he (WILLIAM HICKEY) does show contempt , it is withering; those Portuguese sailors, for instance, who panic-stricken in a storm at sea, scrambled for a crucifix brandished by a priest, and tore it to pieces, are not called cowards or fools or knaves, but ;’miserable enthusiasts’; while they were trying to save their souls, their more stout-hearted fellows were trying to save the ship.

William Plomer. Electric Delights ( Boston: David R. Godine, 1978)

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: WHEN I AM ITALIAN by Joanna Clapps Herman

Beats Me!

SELF-PORTRAITS

“No matter what you do, you can act your heart out, but people will always say, ‘Oh, Julie Adams — “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” ’ ”

Julie Adams

I’m sometimes kind of jealous of my work. It keeps

Getting all the attention and I’m not. After all, I wrote

It.

       John Ashbery

 I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, ‘I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right’.
         

               Tallulah Bankhead

From the experiments I have made, I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person.

                    Thomas Lovell Beddoes

So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.

               Yogi Berra

  I am as dispassionate as it is possible for a human being to be and not be a machine.

     Richard Burton

  It is certain that I am not a great man, but I have an enthusiastic love of great men,

  And I derive a kind of glory from it.

           James Boswell

On Monday the Post  bought the story for  three thousand and threw in a hymn of praise  from Rust Hills in case I should be feeling lonely and insecure. (WILLIAM)  Maxwell  not only said I was a writing machine; he said that I was his story machine. No diminishment was intended. The original comparison was to a tomato plant.

   John Cheever in a letter to Josephine Herbst in

February  1952 in The Letters of John Cheever,

Edited by Benjamin Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 1988)

,

   I have no money, no friends, and am hated by millions just because I always tell the truth. What does that tell you about our society? I would definitely suck as a politician.

          Jose Canseco

Sometimes I feel like a has been who never was.

            Sandra Dee

*****

 NOTICE  
 No animals have been harmed
 In the making of this couplet. 

BLOGS WORTH YOUR TIME: THE ART OF THE PRANK